Professor Hart asks, “Why should the Northern people believe that the South means well by the negro when such a man as Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, brutally threatens him and his white friends in the North?”
When and where has Governor James K. Vardaman “brutally threatened the negro and his Northern friends”?
Governor Vardaman, not many days ago, risked his political life, to say nothing of personal danger, to protect a negro from a white mob. Perhaps every white man in the mob had voted for Vardaman, and was his personal and political friend; yet, although it was generally believed that the negro was guilty of a heinous offense, this Governor, who has been singled out for abuse, did not hesitate one moment to jeopardize his whole political future by throwing around the hunted negro the official protection of the law.
No matter how much Governor Vardaman may be mistaken in some of his views, and some of his utterances, no man ought now to deny that he possesses personal and political courage, or that his respect for law is of that high character which proclaims, “The color of a man’s skin shall not be the measure of his legal rights.”
Furthermore, Dr. Hart says, “in one respect the poor whites are terrible teachers to the negroes; they are an ungovernable people and do not allow themselves to be punished for such peccadillos as murder.”
O Mr. Professor of History at Harvard! has your blind passion against the South lost you to all sense of proportion in the making of public statements?
If the poor whites of the South “do not allow themselves to be punished for such little things as murder,” why do they go to the penitentiary at all?
You will find a sufficient number of poor whites in the penitentiaries of the South—are they there just for the fun of it?